When Should I Accept A Word and When Should I Reject It?

Our last lesson talked about considering the source of the word and being suspicious of words that come from an ungodly source. While God can use anyone to give a word, He usually does not give words through seriously flawed vessels. If a person has overt sin in their life, God is unlikely to use them as His spokesperson. When someone has a serious woundedness that surfaces as a character flaw, that person is an unlikely candidate as a prophetic vessel. Why? Because they are more likely to prophesy from their issue than to speak for God's pure word.

An example would be the type of person who is critical and judgmental to a fault. You have probably met someone like that. If this type of person gives words, they will usually reflect his character flaw instead of delivering God's true word. Their words will be critical and judgmental, because this is their outlook on life. A wounded outlook often flavors and mislead one's ability to hear clearly. That makes this seriously wounded person unlikely as a vessel that God would choose God to speak through; God wants His spokesperson to communicate His message, not their own woundedness or issues.

That is why we are to be cautious of receiving words from seriously wounded individuals, flakes or false prophets. Fortunately, they are usually easy to spot a mile off (unless they are the wolf in sheep's clothing type of false prophet).

We want to leery of the obvious unlikely candidate, but we don't want to fall into the habit of judging the "prophets" instead of judging their words. The enemy would like to trap us into erroneously labeling anyone who's words we don't like as a 'false prophet.' We have to be careful not to do that.

What If I Incorrectly Judge Someone As 'Not A Prophet?'

The trick here is that 1 Corinthians 14:29 admonishes us to judge the prophetic words that are spoken; it does not admonish us to judge the prophet who speaks the word. In short, we are not supposed to judge each other, but we are to judge each prophetic utterance that claims to be God speaking.

In Old Testament times, if a prophet made a single error they were labeled as a false prophet, then taken outside of the city limits to be stoned. But that is not the standard for New Testament prophecy. Why? Because there has been a very important change in God's people from the Old Testament to the New Testament. That happened when Jesus ascended up to Heaven after raising from the dead. He sent His Holy Spirit to live inside each and every believer.

Why is that an important distinction in the prophetic? It is important for two reasons. First, the Holy Spirit teaches us all things and brings all the things Jesus said to our remembrance (John 14:26). In short, He helps us to judge prophecy. He also bears witness to our spirit when a prophetic word is from God (Romans 8:16 and Hebrews 2:4).

Old Testament believers did not have the Holy Spirit living inside of them to help them judge prophecy. So God had to set up other protections to help them evaluate what was really His words. The rule He chose was simple, if anyone is caught giving an untrue word, then that person was to be labeled as a false prophet and eliminated. That rule protected the purity or God's word from would-be false prophets. It made it a lot easier to judge the prophetic in those days, because most people did not run around trying to be prophets when they were not--the price tag for getting caught was just too high.

However, God changed the standard for judging prophecy in New Testament times. It is not "all or not at all" anymore, because the Holy Spirit now lives in each of God's children and helps us to judge all prophetic words.

In addition, the Holy Spirit has released a new type of prophetic into the Church: the gift of prophecy. All we had before Jesus' resurrection as the "Office Of Prophet," which is a governmental position limited to only a few people. But since Jesus rose from the dead, the Holy Spirit has been giving gifts to the Church to edify it and build it up. One of those gifts is the gift of prophecy. It is a "lower level gifting" than the governmental office (or mantle) and it is given to quite a few more believers.

God no longer requires that His prophets have 100% accuracy to speak for Him. Instead, He allows people with the gift of prophecy to go through a learning curve, where they make small mistakes as they learn to move in their gifting. That is ok, it is safe for the church because the Holy Spirit lives inside of each believer. The Holy Spirit bears witness to God's words and He helps us know what really is from God. That is why we are supposed to judge the word and not the person giving the word.

However the truth of the matter is that at times we do judge a prophet as "not of God." There are a few times where it is legitimate to consider/judge the source of a word. We discussed them in the previous lesson, but let's review the highlights. If the person has overt and unrepented sin in their lives, their words should be suspect. If the person has a blatant character flaw that shows through in their words, we tend to suspect their words are from their own woundedness instead of from God. But other than that, we are supposed to judge the word and not the one delivering it.

In real life, there are times where we can't seem to help making a judgment about the person delivering the word. Maybe we see something in their life, attitude or delivery style that offends us. Or maybe we just don't sense God's anointing in their words. Or maybe we catch them making some minor mistake, such as misquoting Scripture or getting a detail wrong. Or maybe we get a check in our spirit about their word on more than one occasion, so we decide the giver of the word is not ok.

We should be careful about doing that, as it can close us to some things that God wants to say to us through that vessel. Let me share one of my own experiences with this. There was one time in my development when I was a bit too full of myself, and I judged a bunch of local prophets to be "not of God."

God did not like that. Do you know what God did to me to correct me? He set up me! For the next couple of years, He only gave me words through those people who I'd judged to be "not of God." I had a choice--suffer a prophecy drought or humble myself to receive words from people I did not like. God used that to teach me that He really was speaking through these people who I had judged, and to remind me to judge the word instead of the one delivering it.

If you have that tendency to judge the prophet, I hope you will learn from my mistake. That way you won't have to go through the same type of correction and learning curve that God made me go through.

Mixed Words -- The Baby And The Bath Water

Sometimes words are not pure words. They contain parts from God but they also have parts that the prophet added apart from God. You might wonder why someone would do that--why would someone claim to speak for God and then add their own stuff to the message?

There are many different reasons this can happen. Sometimes it is as innocent as an inexperienced newer prophet who has difficulty sorting out what is God and what is their own reaction to what God is saying in the message. Sometimes a person has had something engrained into them over and over again, and if they give a word that touches on one of those areas, they add the engrained stuff to it without even realizing that they are doing it. Sometimes people want to expand on a word to help explain it so it makes sense to the receiver. They are well intentioned and don't realize that they are changing the meaning of the word of their explanation, they are taking it a different direction than what God was talking about.

There are also some impure reasons that people add to words. They may want to make a point, or they may want to manipulate the person who the word is for. They may be strongly opinionated and desire to present their own opinions with the same authority as God's prophetic word. Or perhaps they are just not very good at hearing God's voice, but they want to look like an expert (maybe to feel important) so they make up some stuff to make the word sound good. Or perhaps they open themselves to the voice of the enemy and present his words as though they were God's words.

There are two different approaches to mixed ones. A prophet friend of mine likes to prayerfully discern the word, accepting the parts he feels are from God and rejecting the rest. He calls it "eating the meat and spitting out the bones." He trusts his own ability to discern God's voice, so he is comfortable selecting portions of the word and rejecting other parts that are in error.

Another prophet friend of mine takes the opposite approach. Since the whole word claims to be from God, he feels he must accept or reject the whole thing. If the word contains an obvious error, he doesn't feel he can trust any other part of it and he rejects the whole word. He prays and asks God to bring back to him through some other source anything that he rejected that was really from God.

Personally, I use both approaches, depending on the "sense" in my spirit. If the Holy Spirit seems to be baring witness to parts of the word, I am more likely to "eat the meat and spit out the bones." But if I don't get some sort of clear leading from God about parts of the word, then I assume the whole thing is bad and throw it out...asking God to speak to me again on anything that was from Him that I rejected. Most of the time I end up throwing out the whole word when part of it is bad, but occasionally when I sense God explicitly speaking to me about the word, then I glean the God-parts and reject the rest.